Strangers to Themselves

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Yiyun LiCreditRoger Turesson

By Jess Row

March 7, 2014

On a quiet side street in a dusty, unremarkable Beijing neighborhood in the last days of autumn, 1989, a young woman named Shaoai drinks a glass of Tang — an exotic delicacy — and becomes strangely ill. Taken to the hospital, she slips quickly into a coma. At home, waiting anxiously for her return, are her parents (here simply called Uncle and Aunt); a distant teenage cousin, Ruyu, who lives with them and shares a room with Shaoai; and two intimate friends of Ruyu’s, Moran and Boyang.

“One day,” Yiyun Li writes, “the neighbors in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown and burned down at a nearby crossroads, or the day in June when Teacher Pang’s cousin pedaled three bodies on his flatbed tricycle from the Square to the hospital. . . . Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness . . . for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.”

Shaoai was, in fact, a young protesterin Tiananmen Square in May and June of that same year,and as a result, just before falling ill, was expelled from her university, ending any chance of finding a meaningful career. Before long, her doctors discover she’s been poisoned, and for a moment the police consider the possibility that she took the poison herself — which would make her a belated martyr, and “Kinder Than Solitude” a very different kind of novel. But no one believes this for long. It was Ruyu who stole the poison — a chemical from the laboratory of Boyang’s mother, a famous scientist — and Ruyu who seems the only possible culprit.

An orphan, raised by two elderly sisters, secret Catholics, Ruyu views the world with a detachment that would seem saintly were it not so profoundly, pathologically neutral: For her, each day is “a replica of the previous day; a place, any place, was merely a spot for resting during one’s migration from beginning to end.” Sent by her guardians to live with Aunt and Uncle and attend a better school in Beijing, she develops, despite herself, a genuine friendship with Boyang and Moran, a talkative, happy pair who spare no effort to coax her out of her shell. But from the moment of their meeting, Ruyu loathes Shaoai’s arrogance and presumptuousness, and resents being forced to room with her in Aunt and Uncle’s tiny house. Shaoai mocks the younger girl’s contempt for the world, but finds her sexually irresistible, and finally forces herself on Ruyu, telling her afterward: “You have not even been taught to have human feelings. Since they haven’t done that for you, someone else must.”

Given this history, and her possession of the murder weapon, it seems an open-and-shut case; but Ruyu claims the poison was stolen from her room and thus could have been administered by anyone. No charges are filed, the case is closed, and Shaoai lingers, brain-damaged and uncommunicative, for 21 years. She’s watched over by Boyang, who becomes a rich, careless entrepreneur in Beijing, divorced and melancholy, only temporarily diverted by the younger women who want him as their “sugar daddy.” Moran and Ruyu, like so many educated Chinese of their generation, have emigrated to the United States; when the novel opens, at the moment of Shaoai’s death, we find them on opposite sides of the country, secure in American creature comforts but emotionally desolate, divorced and childless, their lives as unresolved as the murder itself.

The easiest possible account of “Kinder Than Solitude” would be to call it an anecdote, an idiosyncratic family episode, that happens to have the exact timeline of contemporary Chinese history as a backdrop. There’s something about the poise, the tidiness, the seemingly ­effortless calm of Yiyun Li’s writing that makes it easy to see her as an author who, like Jhumpa Lahiri, employs a Chekhovian neutrality to give the complicated, messy, ostensibly “colorful” lives of her characters a kind of unthreatening watercolor ambience.

But look again at the way Li describes that memory of Shaoai’s sickness — “the neighbors in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown” — and notice that beneath the passivity there’s a withering, vibrating sarcasm at work in the juxtaposition of national and personal tragedies. Is that all, Li seems to be asking. Should the teenagers of the Tiananmen era really be expected to trade the pursuit of happiness for “the belief in feeling less, suffering little”?

The answer, of course, is no. When Shaoai’s father tells her, “We’ve had enough revolutions in our lifetime,” Shaoai shoots back, “Our revolution” is “going to be completely different from yours. All your revolutions came from following the lead without thinking.” And in a sense — though not the sense she intended — she’s right: The revolution that sweeps China, only a few years after the Tiananmen massacre, is the revolution of prosperity, entrepreneurship, individual success. Boyang, who alone among the three friends remains in China, is an acute observer of the rootless, vacuous, ahistorical world of the 20-somethings all around him, for whom “what happened 20 years ago was as ancient as the events of 200 or 2,000 years ago.”

Perhaps the most moving passage in “Kinder Than Solitude” comes when Boyang revisits Shichahai, one of the few places in Beijing where the alleyways of the old city are preserved, and a place where he and Moran often took Ruyu, showing off their knowledge of the architecture and history of the capital. Now Shichahai has become a fashionable district, where “chic white-collar workers, expats of all nationalities, tourists and imitators of ­every kind converged”:

“What draws you here, Boyang wanted to grab someone’s shoulder and ask; what makes you leave your country, your city, your neighborhood, and come here to be part of this display of self-importance? Once upon a time, this had just been another neighborhood where people lived out their minor tragedies and comedies. Now it was called the sexiest spot in Beijing. . . . How many people by the waterfront had murderous thoughts now and then, dark ghosts casting shadows on their minds, from which they had to look away? How many had succeeded in a murder?”

A murder mystery, properly executed, is a wonderful thing, and Li shows great dexterity at delaying the explanation of Shaoai’s murder till the last possible moment. But the lingering taste of “Kinder Than Solitude” is a pervasive bitterness over the crushed and wasted dreams of the teenagers of 1989. The unsolved crime that haunts this novel is the bodies driven from the Square on a flatbed tricycle, whose dark ghosts cast shadows everywhere you look, even in the gleaming China of today.

Jess Row’s latest book, the novel “Your Face in Mine,” will be published in August.